I have a 80g hard drive partitioned into four partitions, when I try to install Ubuntu desktop from the CD I burned everything goes well untill step 5 where it is supposed to recognize my partitions. It only seems to see two although it gets the total capacity right and it wants to resize a partition. All I want to do is put it into an already empty partition (20g) but there doesn't seem to be an easy way of just pointing it to the partition I want and telling it to install. Any help will be appreciated. Fredall

If the 20gb partition you want to write to is currently empty, or you don't mind completely overwriting it, why don't you just delete it from the patition list? Then you will have listed a 20gb unpartitioned space, which you can select to be mounted as /, using up all that (now) unpartitioned space, re-designated as 20gb of ext3, or whatever you want (reiserfs, etc.). Don't forget that you probably want to have a separate /swap partition (which is greater than or equal to the size of your RAM, if you want to use hibernate/suspend to hard drive option).

Maybe I don't understand your problem and it is more complicated that I imagine.